Tom Hanks has spent so much time over the last decade carving out a space for himself as a Jimmy Stewart-style American Everyman for the 21st century that one can forget how regular a guy he actually is. He showed up on HBO the other day in a documentary about the legendary football and baseball teams of his youth and home town, the famously thuggish Oakland Raiders and the Oakland "A"s. Oakland is the scrappy, down-at-heel, I-don't-get-no-respect, biker-centric, half-black, blue-collar city across the Bay from toney-phoney-baloney San Francisco. It wasn't hard to admire Hanks' home-town pride in the two teams that were so successful when he was at high school in the late 1960s. For a moment, it was easy to buy his Jimmy Stewart act.

That was the first time in ages I'd felt that Average Joe whiff rising from Hanks. Onscreen the act has been getting more than a little tiresome and threadbare for some time now. Since the success of Private Ryan, Hanks has attached himself with limpet-like devotion to the "Greatest Generation" and all its doings, producing Band Of Brothers and speaking at veterans' functions. Indeed, when some right-wing local TV stations recently refused to run Saving Private Ryan uncut and without commercials for Veterans' Day - as their parent network was doing - part of the collective disgust at this piece of craven cowardice (GIs really said "fuck" on D-Day? The horror!) was directed at the idea that Tom Hanks could be offensive in anything he says or does.

And to those people on the right who were offended one need merely ask: did you even see Forrest Gump? The one about the great-great-great grandson of the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, the guy who beat up the Black Panther activist in an explosion of displaced racist rage? That year - 1994, the year of the Gingrich Congress - Tom's role really was in tune with the harsh, Every (white) man public mood. Gump director Robert Zemeckis and Hanks have just teamed up for another scarcely human endeavour, the computer-animated fantasy The Polar Express (pictured), which, despite the presence of Hanks in five voice roles, looks set to be a massive Christmas turkey.

What with Cast Away, The Terminal and The Road To Perdition in his recent past, it's time Tom took a few risks. Time to play a serial killer or a national traitor. Time to strangle Regular Joe.